The views and photographs of Adrian Colston

Menu

Storm Desmond

The Environment Agency have just published a document on what has happened in Cumbria since devastating flooding caused by Storm Desmond in December 2015. It is called Reducing flood risk from source to sea: first steps towards an integrated catchment plan for Cumbria. You can download and read it here.

Actions to prevent flooding in Cumbria have divided into 5 main themes

Strengthening defences

Upstream thinking

Maintenance

Resilience

Water level management boards

I’m very pleased to see ‘Upstream Thinking’ as one of the themes. Although at this stage (understandably) the detail is rather thin the document does talk about “land-management techniques such as soil aeration, bunds, leaky dams, woodland creation and river restoration to absorb water and slow the flow in locations across Cumbria” and “restoring at least 350 hectares of high priority peatland to absorb water upstream of communities, and we are creating natural flood storage areas upstream”.

This graphic gives and indication of what might be planned

I will be interested to see what reaction there is to this document from Cumbrian communities, farmers and organisations such as the National Trust (who own a great deal of the land involved).

My heart goes out to all the people and communities in Cumbria and southern Scotland who have been impacted by the dreadful flooding. In addition the National Trust is a major landowner in the Lake District (we own around 25%) and I personally know many of the Rangers and General Managers up there. I can only imagine how stressful everything must be and how disheartening it will be to see so many places and projects damaged by the flood waters.

The National Trust’s property at Fell Foot on Lake Windermere on Sunday – I was at a meeting in this building 18 months ago (photo from https://www.facebook.com/ntfellfoot/) You can find out more here about the flooding in the Lake District and how it has affected the NT.

Much has been written already about Storm Desmond and no doubt a great deal more is to come. I have heard a number of politicians understandably saying that we must never let this happen again. I fear though that those words will be easier to say than achieve.

The questions therefore that need to be answered are why did it happen and what can we do to better protect places and people?

Why did it happen?
I guess the obvious needs to be stated – there was a huge storm….. in my blog yesterday I set out a few of the startling statistics provided by the Met Office and the Environmental Agency. I also quoted the following ‘279mm rain fell in 1 day in 1955. This UK record lasted for 54 years, till 316mm fell in 2009. Just 6 years later 341mm falls.’ Cumbria has now been hit by huge storms in 2006, 2009 and now in 2015. Each of those events was a 1 in a 100 + flood event – three such events in less than a decade. That is just Cumbria – we mustn’t forget the Somerset Levels events in 2013-14 and those all along the Thames in the same year, then there was Gloucester, York, Boscastle etc etc.

To quote the Guardian “The Met Office has warned that ‘all the evidence’ suggests climate change played a role in the floods which have devastated thousands of homes following Storm Desmond. The Met Office’s chief scientist Dame Julia Slingo said the extreme weather conditions were ‘extraordinary’. She told BBC Radio 4’s World At One: ‘Is it to do with climate change? There can’t yet be a definitive answer but we know that all the evidence from fundamental physics and what we understand about our weather patterns, that there is potentially a role.’”

Yesterday in Parliament Liz Truss, the Environmental Secretary said “The government’s view is that these floods are consistent with what we know about climate change. The government’s flood defence plans contain assumptions about climate change. But that modelling will have to be reviewed in the light of the current floods.”

Again according to the Guardian a spokesperson for the Environment Agency said “Climate change is happening now and we must build resilience and adapt to the changes that are unavoidable. Climate change adaptation has been going on for some time: sea level rise has been factored into coastal decisions since 1998.”

Lord Deben, (the former Conservation Environment Minister John Gummer), and now Chair of the Committee on Climate Change said on Twitter “People with real concern for flood victims should be constantly reminded of the consequences of climate change.”

Ironic perhaps that Storm Desmond should occur whilst the International Climate Change Talks in Paris (COP21) are in full flow. Let us hope that these negotiations are successful and effective. We already have seen 1 degree of global warming since the Industrial Revolution – all the science says that we must keep future changes below 2 degrees (i.e. 1 degree more than where we are now).

What can we do to better protect places and people?The National Trust has set out its concerns along with some of the adaptation solutions we are trialling in its recent document Forecast Changeable. Click here to download the report. For example there is a short summary of the work that has been carried out on the Holnicote Estate on Exmoor – which aims to demonstrate that by working at a catchment scale and changing some land management practices, a natural approach to flood management can be achieved while producing wider environmental and community benefits. See here, here and here for more details of the project.

WWF has also produced a report Slowing the Flow – a natural solution to flooding problems – download it here.

Professor Steve Ormerod (who is also the Chair of RSPB) and Edward Maltby have produced a useful review of the benefits of rivers and wetlands in managing floods and other environmental services. You can download the chapter here.

So here are two projects and a review document which advocate ‘upstream’ management to try and reduce / eliminate flooding. So why have I picked on these and not talked about building flood defences and dredging rivers?

There is increasing concern in many circles now that the way that we are managing our catchments and rivers is actually aggravating the problems we face from rain storms. Many catchments are now either denuded of vegetation (are in arable cultivation), have compacted soils (either from stock or agricultural machinery) or have short uniform vegetation (e.g. the uplands of much of Britain). These three factors ensure that any storm water which hits them travels very quickly into water courses (i.e. they are not absorbed by the soil) and then into rivers which have been straightened, deepened and dredged. The water then travels very quickly until it reaches an obstacle such as a bridge or a town – at which point the banks breach and flood defences are overtopped and flooding such as we have just witnessed in Carlisle occurs.

Projects such as the Holnicote one on Exmoor aims to achieve the opposite – that is hold and absorb as much of the storm water in the upper catchment for as long as possible.

Interestingly some habitat types are much better at absorbing water than others, for example maize fields (especially those on slopes) are terrible at it and I have written about this before – see here and here. Other habitats such as woodland on the other hand are very good at it. Research carried out in Upland Wales found that areas planted up with trees were 67 times better at absorbing water when compared to grazed pastures. See here and here.

Encouraging therefore to report that during the Commons debate on the flooding in northern Britain and Southern Scotland earlier in the week that Anne-Marie Trevelyan, a Conservative MP who represents Berwick-upon-Tweed, said that more trees should be planted on high land to reduce the risk of flooding. Liz Truss, the Environment Secretary responded by saying that this is an issue the government is considering.

Depressing though to hear Meurig Raymond, President of the National Farmers Union on the Today programme yesterday, basically saying that more money was need to dredge rivers, channel maintenance and hard infrastructure. He was completely unprepared to countenance upstream management solutions. He seemed to be arguing that farming was so important in the uplands that it couldn’t be altered to incorporate upstream management considerations. You can listen to the interview with Meurig Raymond and George Monbiot here and then draw your own conclusions.https://adriancolston.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/bestoftoday-20151208-stormdesmondcanfarmerspreventfloods.mp3

This debate has got a long way to run and to be honest it is not an ‘either / or’ situation, however the status quo simply won’t work and has been shown not to work.

What does all this mean for Dartmoor?This debate isn’t of course just about the Lake District – this could have happened on Dartmoor. At some point in the future a big storm will hit the West Country – maybe the rainfall won’t be as huge as in the Lake District because the Tors aren’t as high as the mountains but who knows.

Land use on Dartmoor is pretty much identical to the Lakes and the woodlands that exist are largely restricted to the river valleys. The debate therefore about upstream solutions to flooding are very relevant to Dartmoor too. My blog about changes in the vegetation in the Upper Plym (see here) shows that in recent years the moor has become less resilient and less able to hold back the water. There has been some upstream work on Dartmoor via the Dartmoor Mires Project but at this stage it has only covered a tiny area of the moor, was considered controversial by some, is currently being reviewed and any future works are not funded. This type of project needs to shoot up the agenda on Dartmoor.

We shouldn’t also forget that there are a lot of towns around the fringes of the moor located next to moorland rivers. As in the Lake District the first major pinch point for rivers in spate are these towns.

Traditionally our December walk (National Trust Wild Tribe and Torquay Boys Grammar School 10 Tors training teams) has culminated with a barbecue. We have spent much of this week monitoring the weather to see whether it was going to be possible this year. All week the Met Office have been forecasting high winds on Dartmoor and earlier in the week they were also forecasting heavy rain as a result of Storm Desmond. We decided as a result to replace the BBQ with a pasty and to shorten the walk.

As the week progressed Storm Desmond was forced north – this is the Met Office weather warnings from yesterday – Dartmoor has been fortunate – it is very rare you see a red rain warning – as the news clearly shows this morning the maximum impact of the storm was felt in Cumbria and the Scottish Southern Uplands

Whilst it was quite windy on Dartmoor yesterday it was dry – here is Little Mis Tor

Route checking by the River Walkham

Crossing the Walkham

The tradition of chocolate treats at Fice’s Well. There is a Pixie legend based around Fice’s Well – see here – in addition to that story the well water has been linked with therapeutic qualities associated with curing eye problems!